Tiny Elaborate Bonsai Treehouses

Japanese artist Takanori Aiba starts with the Japanese art of pruning bonsai, and then transforms the work into a tiny world within and around the bonsai tree. His elaborate treehouses have carefully constructed latticework and landings with stairs that wrap around the piece in a maze-like fashion. Some of the pieces have moved on to omit bonsai entirely, so that the miniature architecture simply winds up and down cliffs and other rocky structures.

Made from materials such as styrene foam, wood clay, epoxy putty, aluminium foil, and dry flowers, the work is incredibly detailed and whimsical– it looks like little people have been building the structure as they needed it, to accomodate all of their tiny lighthouses and castles. From Takanori Aiba’s site:

My source of creations are my early experience of bonsai making and maze illustration. These works make use of an aerial perspective, which like the diagram for a maze shows the whole from above(the macro View) while including minute details (the micro view). If you explore any small part of my works, you find amazing stories and some unique characters.

It’s also impressive that each sculpture can be framed so perfectly in their individual bell jars or glass houses. I find that Japanese artists get featured on here a lot because of their amazing attention to details, both for the product/object and the packaging. There’s not a speck of material on here that didn’t get rigorously designed.

(Coincidentally, Aiba is also the mastermind behind the restaurant with ninja waiters, Ninja New York!) [Via Design Taxi.]

3 comments

The more I look at these, the more annoyed I get ><. I love the concept, and the less extensive ones are great, but I feel like the ones where the beauty of the tree is subsumed almost entirely beneath the structures are a swing and a miss. It strikes me as arrogant to cover the trees so completely with something man made, not to mention pointless – why not just make the structure without the tree?